Columbia Basin

“ Periodically, the monotony is broken by the arrival of loaded busses, which stop only long enough to allow passengers to gulp a cup of coffee, or to stretch their cramped limbs before beginning the next lap of their journeys. This part of the Columbia Basin is both a land of promise and a graveyard of hope. Despite the lightness of the precipitation, which is seldom more than six inches annually, there are productive farms and flourishing stock ranches on the deep soil, rich in nitrates, lime, and magnesium. ”

“ The Highlands, unlike the heavily wooded Cascades, are largely open and park-like, with a minimum of undergrowth.
South of the Okanogan Highlands almost to the Oregon boundary and extending east of the Cascades almost to the Idaho boundary, is the Columbia Basin, an area approximately 1,500,000 acres of sage and scabland. From an elevation of 500 feet at the Columbia River, lowest point in the region, the basin rises rapidly westward toward the foothills of the Cascades; eastward, the rise is more gradual to an elevation of approximately 2,000 feet at the Idaho Line. ”

“ The molten stream flowed westward to Goat Mountain and the "Buttes," of which it made islands; threw a dike across a watercourse and created Lake Merrill; and turning southward, filled valleys and overwhelmed good forest with sheets of basalt. Upon the slope just north of Peterson's, a great synclinal thus buried presents one of the latest pages in the volcanic history of the Columbia basin.
Mount Adams from the southwest, with White Salmon glacier (left) and Avalanche glacier (right) flowing from a common source, the cleft between North and Middle Peaks. ”

“ Wilkes and his intelligent officers readily grasped, and conveyed through an elaborate report to the government, the idea that Puget Sound was an inherent and integral part of Oregon and that the Columbia Basin was essential to the proper development of American commerce upon the Pacific. They may also have forecast the time when California with her girdles of gold and chaplets of freedom would spring, Athena-like, from the Zeus brain of American enterprise. ”

“ It is only a question of a few years till the locks at Celilo will be completed, and then the whole vast Inland Empire, with its enormous production, will be thrown open to the sea. Then there will come on a new age of steamboat navigation, and with it the electric railroad. The steamer and the trolley car will set the whole Columbia Basin next door to tide-water. When improvements now in view by Government are completed, our River will be one of the most superb steamer courses in the world. ”

“ These peaks are veined with gold, silver, and copper.
[Pg 6] That first age of mountain uplift was ended by the coming on of the age of fire. The granite upheaval of the Blue and the Cascade Mountains was blown apart and cracked asunder by volcanic eruption and seismic force. A vast outflow of basalt and andesite swept westward from the Blue Mountains to meet a similar outflow moving eastward from the Cascades. Thus, throughout the Columbia Basin, the surface is mainly of volcanic rock overlying the shattered fragments of the original earth crust. ”

“ Although the Columbia Basin project is primarily an irrigation development, it will also provide the world's greatest power plant with a capacity more than one-fourth greater than that of Boulder Dam. Power is to be distributed over a wide area, and it is predicted that the proceeds from its sale will not only pay for the project, but will eventually bring the Nation a profit on its investment. ”

“ Frost, too, comes early in this elevated' region, which the Creator has reserved to keep pure the air we breathe and the thoughts we think.
Everywhere one goes in this middle land, between the Cascade and the Blue Banges, the impression is received of newness,—I do not mean of men’s work, but of God’s work. The country is not finished. The soil is still being formed upon the bed-rock of the Columbia Basin, which in some places is yet uncovered. ”

“ If it was possible for this once inland sea to be transformed into a blistering barren waste, why would it not be equally possible for this same power to tear down and remove the barriers that now arise between this desert and its natural source of water supply, the mountains that so change the currents of air and rend asunder the vaporous clouds, and thereby render condensation impossible. What right had man to dictate the conditions that shall obtain in certain localities, and would nature concede their demands?
To Travis Gully the possibilities of irrigation were unknown. ”

“ The scenery of the Columbia, between Fort Vancouver and the Dalles, is a sublime monotone. Its banks are basaltic crags or mist-wrapt domes, averaging below the cataract from twelve to fifteen hundred feet in height, and thence decreasing to the Dalles, where the escarpments, washed by the river, are low trap bluffs on a level with the steamer's walking-beam, and the mountains have retired, bare and brown, like those of the great continental basin farther south, toward Mount Hood in that direction, and Mount Adams on the north. ”

“ MAP OF THE COLUMBIA PLATEAU Long ago, before the eruptions began, the geography of the Northwest was very different from what it is now. Instead of a vast plateau there were mountains and valleys. Lowlands occupied most of the region where the Cascade Range now rises with its lofty volcanic peaks. Portions of the basin of the present Columbia River were occupied by lakes which extended southwest into California.
Movements of the earth began to affect the region of the present plateau, and at many points the solid rocks were fissured and broken. ”

“ All the timber of the country—fir, pine, cedar, spruce, and larch—grows on the high mountain ridges, except the mere fringes of cotton-wood and willow which border the streams. The Blue Mountains constitute a wall between the Columbia River Basin, to the north, and the Klamath Basin to the south; hence all the rivers of East Oregon head in these mountains, and flow into the Columbia and Snake Rivers, only excepting those in the Klamath Basin, which run south and empty into marshy lakes or sinks. ”

“ The Columbia River Basin project is being studied and will be one to be considered at some future time.
The Inland Waterways Corporation is proving successful and especially beneficial to agriculture. A survey is being made to determine its future needs. It has never been contemplated that if inland rivers were opened to navigation it would then be necessary for the Federal Government to provide the navigation. ”

“ The Great Basin includes Nevada, the western half of Utah, a small part of southern Oregon and Idaho, and also a part of Southern California. It is a great interior basin with all its rivers draining into salt lakes or dry sinks. In recent geological times the Great Basin was filled with water, forming the great Lake Bonneville which drained into the Columbia River. In fact, the Great Basin is made up of a series of great valleys, with very level floors, representing the old lake bottom. ”

“ Passing west of Glacier Lake through the enchanted North Star Park, a veritable land of Beulah (at least when the sun is shining) , we climb a thousand or twelve hundred feet higher, and find ourselves at one of those thrilling points in the mountains, a “divide.” We are on the crest of the Cascade
Horseshoe Basin through a Rock Gap, Stehekin Cañon.
Photo. by T. W. Tolman. Mountains. To the east the water flows to Lake Chelan, thence to the Columbia, and thence to the Pacific by a journey of six hundred miles. ”

“ Village of Indian Tepees, Umatilla Reservation, near Pendleton, Oregon. Many of these Indians are rich landowners, but they prefer tents to houses.
The Columbia River basin, alone of all the territories which the United States has added to its original area, was neither bought with money nor annexed by war. Its acquisition was a triumph of the American pioneer. Many nations looked with longing to this Northwest, but it fell a prize to the nation that neglected it. ”

“ Who knows but what at some remote period the mighty Columbia river had flowed through this grand coulee, emptying into an inland sea, the bed of which now formed the desert of almost a million acres, destined to be the home of half as many people? Flowing thus for ages, nourishing plants now unknown; its limpid waters, cooling and refreshing the prehistoric [Pg 54] monsters that came daily to drink at its brink ”

“ Without these mountains, whose gorges are fed during the spring, and even in the summer, by melted snow, there would be no water. The levels of the valleys are still unknown; it is yet a question how far they are irregular in elevation, whether they have formed detached lakes, or whether they slope uniformly and by steps toward the Great Salt Lake and the other reservoirs scattered at intervals over the country.
The water-shed of the Basin is toward the north, south, east, and west: the affluents of the Columbia and the Colorado rivers carry off the greatest amount of drainage. ”

“ Its form is approximately that of an isosceles triangle, with the sharp angle extending into Lower California, W. of the Colorado river; the northern edge being formed by the divide of the drainage basin of the Columbia river, the eastern by that of the Colorado, the western by the central part of the Sierra Nevada crest, and by other high mountains. The N. boundary and much of the E. is not conspicuously uplifted, being plateau, rather than mountain. ”

“ This is an area of interior drainage, made up of many minor basins, of which the chief is that of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. See Great Basin.
The Columbia and Snake River Plateaus. Large areas drained by these streams in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington are of volcanic origin, and along the Snake River in Idaho and Oregon the lavas form plateaus about 4000 feet in altitude. They are a natural desert, since the region is arid, but are capable of great development under the process of irrigation. ”

“ Between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades lies what is locally known as the Inland Empire, mainly a continuous prairie or series of prairies and valleys, wheat land, orchard land, garden land, fertile, beautiful, attractive, broken by an occasional mountain spur, as the irregular mass of the Blue Mountains, but substantially an inhabited land, reaching from Colville, Spokane, and the Okanogan on the north to the Klamath valleys on the south, a region five hundred miles long by two hundred wide, a goodly land, one difficult to excel in all the potentialities of use for human needs. ”

“ The only remaining master stream is the Columbia, with its widespread sources in the Rocky Mountains. These largely belong to its tributary, the Snake River, which after passing the lava plateaus joins the trunk stream in southern Washington. The Columbia has an important tidal course before it enters the ocean, and this and the Saint Lawrence are the only rivers of the United States which receive great accessions to their waters from foreign territory. ”

“ Along the west side of the River for twenty-five miles extends a belt of the most fertile land. An immense pumping plant run by electricity, which in turn is generated by the current, has been put in at the foot of the rapids. By this the water is conducted over the twenty thousand or more acres of land available, and it is the expectation that within a few years a dense population will line the river bank and repeat on a larger and finer scale the miracle of redemption by water already performed at various points on the River and its tributaries. ”

“ Generally speaking, the rivers of the Pacific slope descend from high altitudes in comparatively short distances, and are necessarily swift. Hence we can expect no such vast extent of navigable water on them as the Mississippi and its affluents offer. Aside from the Columbia itself, the main streams, east of the Cascade Mountains offering steamboat transportation, are the Snake, Okanogan, and Kootenai, together with Lakes Pend Oreille, Chelan, Cœur d’Alene, Flathead, Okanogan, Kootenai, Arrow, Christina, and Slocan. On the west side are the Willamette, Cowlitz, and Lewis rivers. ”

“ Don't want a man to lose any chances, do you?"
So much has been said of this mighty river that the preconceived idea of the tourist is of a surging flood of unknown depth rushing like a mountain torrent. The plain facts are that the Lower Columbia is rather a placid stream, with a sluggish current, and the channel shoals up to eight feet, then falling to twelve, fifteen and seventeen feet, and suddenly dropping to 100 feet of water and over. In the spring months it will rise from twenty-five to forty feet, leaving driftwood high up among the trees on the banks. ”

“ Yosemite has loftier waterfalls and has cliffs that in some respects are even more imposing. Puget Sound has finer distant scenes, with lagoons and channels and archipelagoes. Each of these grand exhibitions of nature’s works is equal or even superior to the Columbia Gorge in some special feature. But the River has every feature. It has cliffs and mountains and waterfalls and cataracts, valleys and forests, broad marine views near and distant, colour and form, shore and sky, earth and air and water, a commingling of all elements of beauty, grandeur, and physical interest. ”